COTABATO CITY, Philippines – Army Rangers gunned down a rebel and wounded six others as they foiled Tuesday an attempt by the New People’s Army guerillas to get close to a farming village to collect “protection money” from farmers at a hinterland district at the border of Magsaysay, Davao del Sur and Tulunan, North Cotabato.
Local officials said the attempt by the NPAs to enforce taxation was pre-empted with the help of vigilant villagers that reported seeing rebels converging at a hinterland, preparing to march toward farming enclaves at the northeastern part of Tulunan.
The hostilities forced dozens of families to evacuate to neutral grounds for fear of a repeat of the encounter.
Col. Prudencio Asto, public affairs chief of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said combatants of the 6th Scout Ranger Company, a unit of the 2nd Scout Ranger Battalion, managed to drive away the rebels after an hour-long running firefight.
Asto said an NPA guerilla was killed in the ensuing encounter.
Barangay folks confirmed seeing the fleeing rebels carry five wounded companions, three of them adolescents, as they fled in haste.
One of the six wounded NPAs was found abandoned by pursuing Rangers, writhing in pain in a corn field about a hundred meters away from the scene of the encounter.
The wounded NPA, Reynante Soliman Dalon, was immediately evacuated to the military hospital inside the Army’s Camp Siongco in Datu Odin Sinsuat town in Maguindanao.
“His evacuation to the Camp Siongco Hospital was in keeping with humanitarian laws. He will be treated nicely while under military custody,” Asto said.
Tuesday’s NPA-Army encounter in Tulunan came a week after the Army’s 602nd Brigade intensified its effort to protect hapless farming communities in North Cotabato from NPAs.
The NPAs have earlier burned down costly farm machineries of multinational firms in Makilala, North Cotabato for refusing to shell out “protection money.”